Speedbump #2

After that October, I was freaked out obviously.  Now that I knew that stuff like that could happen to me, I was going to take every precaution.  I was going to be psycho pregnant lady.  The doctor told us to wait 3 months before trying to get pregnant again.  Of course, that timeline didn't work out with my work schedule but we felt like one of the things that we learned from that experience was that God's plan for me is more important than my plan.  So, if timing wasn't what we wanted it to be, we weren't going to worry about it anymore. 

In February 2011, we found out that we were pregnant again, though things with that pregnancy were weird from the beginning.  My HCG levels were low and my progesterone was practically non-existent.  We were sent to have an ultrasound at 8 weeks and the baby was measuring closer to 6 weeks but there was a heartbeat.  I was put on progesterone and told to take it easy.  And I was following orders to the T.

But on Wednesday, April 6th in the afternoon, I started spotting.  At first it a little red, then it was mostly brown.  We had tickets to the Anaheim Ducks game that night and Matt asked if I was sure that I wanted to go.  I prayed about it and what the on-call doctor from before said came to my mind.  I figured that if it was happening, there wasn't anything I could do to stop it.  I had called my doctor, we kept my 10 week appointment for Friday.  When we got to the appointment 2 days later, the ultrasound showed that the baby hadn't grown at all and there was no longer a heartbeat.  We were told to keep an eye out for me to pass all the pregnancy tissue over the weekend.  Basically to look for the sack that had my baby in it when I went to the bathroom.  She wanted me to save it if I could and bring it in to the office so tests could be ran, since it was my second miscarriage.  If it didn't happen naturally, then the next week she wanted to proceed with a DNC.  Later that day, it happened.  It was a bit surreal.  Like I was outside of my body.  I was able to collect the sack and save it to bring to the doctor on Monday.  If you held the plastic bag I put it in up to the light, you could even see a little fetus silhouette.  As I write this today, almost 2 and a half years later, I can't believe that I was able to go through that so objectively.  How was I able to keep my baby in a brown paper bag in the fridge over the weekend?  How was I not a complete mess?  That's why I think I must have felt outside of myself, like it was happening to someone else.  I think I feel more about it now. 

As timing would have it, Matt's sister and family came into town the next day, providing yet another distraction for us.  I'm not sure if that was fortunate or unfortunate because we never grieved at all for the loss.  We never really had a lot of time for that either pregnancy.  I remember feeling like this loss was harder because we actually got to see the baby and heartbeat and it was farther along.  As I write this now, I'm overwhelmed with sadness because if memory serves me right, I think I threw away those ultrasound pictures.  Out of anger, out of frustration, out of "dealing with it" by pretending like it didn't happen.  Either that or I hid them really well.  I hope that's the case and I stumble across them one day.